Hi,
I have to submit a lesson plan for a business class. (small class,the students work for a large,international company) Teaching materials are my choice..magazine and newspaper articles,etc. ** Can anyone give me some ideas/suggestions for putting a lesson plan(s) together? This is all new for me.

You should add the country's name or your students' nationality as I can't see how you could be expected to be teaching identical things to students in different countries!
If your students happen to be Chinese, they will need a lot of basic information on how a free market operates, what a contract is, what WTO stands for, that laws are there to protect rather than inhibiting free enterprise.

The students should be able to introduce themselves
as though they are on a business trip in the states.

This often takes place when the company sends them abroad
so this is a practical excercise as well.
Standing in front of a group of strangers and talking about
yourself is challenging and will probably take a lot of practice.

Also important is Telephone English.They probably will at some
time have to have an English conversation on the phone with
a native speaker.

I've taught a few corporate classes myself over the years, including Intel Corp, British-American Tobacco and Coca-Cola, and I'm happy to offer you a few humble tips and suggestions.

One of the strategies that seems to work well for me is this: First, do a web-search on the company you'll be teaching for. Collect some recent press-releases, marketing reports, the annual report, and maybe even a chart which shows the company's stock values over the past year. I like to use http://news.google.com for collecting this kind of info.

Then ... after weeding out the good stuff from the bad, you can introduce one of the above documents, along with some specific vocabulary and/or grammar, and discuss it in more depth.

Another good idea: Find out, for example, who the main competitors are for THAT particular company, and consider presenting a lesson plan on the competitor. For Coca-Cola, it was easy: Can you say P E P S I ??

Business students are sometimes "wowed" by this kind of stuff, because it's interesting, relevant and always contains some useful tidbits and vocabulary related to their own company that they themselves didn't know about or understand fully.

Of course, you need to be very careful about keeping the lesson plan geared to the proficiency-level of your class, and this is sometimes easier said than done.

It's also a very good idea during the first class to play the 'doctor-patient' game with them ... in which you (as the doctor) find out from THEM (the patients) exactly how and when they actually use English in their day-to-day corporate life. Are they using it on the telephone, face-to-face with foreign managers, or writing emails? etc. With this information, you can now 'tailor' your lesson plans to better meet their needs.

Hi.
Another thing you could try out is having them give you a virtual tour of the company, how things work, etc. just as they would do for a visiting foreigner to their company. Get them to anticipate the questions that the foreigner would ask and try to make replies to these questions. Get them to research a similar company (competitor) in another country and see if their mission statements and management styles are the same. This can be done through the internet.
It's also always good to go through negotiation styles, and specific cultural business styles. For example, someone from the west will be fairly blunt and to the point, whereas someone from Japan would consider this very insulting. Someone from Korea, on the other hand, may like to do business over lots of soju.
You may also want to think about describing trends and graphs - rising, peak, falling...etc and being able to say why.
Good luck. There are several good books out there, Business Basics is ok for low-intermediate level students.

PS: As Erica mentioned above, there are tons of business text books out there to choose from. One that I like in particular is: "Market Leader" by David Cotton, David Falvey and Simon Kent; published jointly by Longman and the Financial Times.

Does Business English fall clearly within the boundaries of Job Discussion/Employment? That's how I interpret this forum.

But to make up for my lack of advice, planning a lesson plan for a business based class should come after doing a needs analysis of the students. What do they need? Do they have to speak on the phone? Do they send emails? Do they attend meetings, give presentations, etc? Where do you see their weaknesses, grammar, vocab, pronunciation, etc? Base the lesson plan on the combination of the two. Concentrate mainly on one thing per lesson and make sure there is a variety of different things over the course; business skills, vocabulary building, fluency, grammar, etc etc.

My final advice is to post in the correct forum. I personally rarely check this one, as I have a job and am not looking for another one, nor do I enjoy the other "fluff" as Kent describes it.